On December 9th 2021, at the Social Work Forum: Utilizing the customer’s experience in the development of social and health services at the Southwest Finland Social Competence Center in Finland, Susanna, a member of IPAN and mother with lived experience gave the following passionate speech:
Read below for Susanna’s full English translation of her speech.
There is also a Link to Forum (In Finnish)
When I started sketching this speech, I clung to David Tobis’s From Pariah to Partners (2013, 13),
in which he states that a child in foster care is traumatized when he or she is separated from his or
her family, and that most often these children blame themselves for it. In addition, some children
may feel that while they are being cared for in a foster family, several children report experiencing a
sense of alienation; felt as if they were guests in the family or a source of income for the family.
Before education and therapy, I thought violence against women and children is a natural part of
life. Education, therapy, and working in the field broadened my thinking, and I realized that
deprivation accumulates over generations, and yet violence and difficult living conditions can be
independent of social class or status. In structures and benevolence, violence is only more difficult
to identify.
According to David Tobis´ (Tobis 2013, 22), social and health professionals working in society’s
service system are helpless to face helpless families. This helplessness cost the life of six-year-old
Elisa Equierdo. I was also shocked by the abuse of eight-year-old Vilja Eerika in Finland, which led
to her death on Mother’s Day in 2012. The deaths of Elisa, Vilja Eerika and other children and
young people affect me personally.
(Break)
The David Tobis I mentioned above works as a sociologist in the United States, and I strive to act
through experience as a kind of sociological window to a family where from one generation to the
next the transferred misery also led to the death of my youngest child. Together with the social
authorities, we ended up where my son literally dropped through the safety net of our society.
The death of my own child, in my current understanding, is the worst thing that can be experienced
as a mother, a parent. My son, Jere, lives in me, and the words in my speech come from my heart,
and already through somewhat worked-out experiences. My speech is a symbol that will help me to
put my cards together – how we can work together for a better functioning welfare and service
system so that we can avoid such deaths in the future. Nor can I fail to emphasize that the moment
of bringing a loved one beyond is an excruciatingly short experience, but post-production – mental
cleansing – is a life-long process, not to mention grief.
Violence traumatizes, and with trauma, words can be lost between the people around us and even
our generations. Most of us get the words somewhat given. For my part, the words are largely
hidden in the untreated traumas that insidiously open up in the prevailing everyday life, if only a
favorable space, an opportunity, can be found for them. Those who could tell, or otherwise express,
about these silenced and taboo subjects are buried in mold. At their most concrete, the words passed
down from generation to generation are hidden in white, or already yellowed, plankets as black
curvy stains. These are now called legal and patient documents. The letters stored in these
documents have formed words and sentences, from which I have also unearthed interpretations of
the reality accumulated between the lines. In any case, shared and / or silenced words contribute to
shaping our identity and understanding of the world around us. At the beginning of the two
thousandth century, when I started therapy and studies, I felt that I was largely dependent on my
imagination as an archaeologist of words in the tombs of the deceased. I have been my family’s
eldest on my father’s side for almost a decade, and now death corrects the younger generation.
Dear friends! I will begin the actual speech I have built around my intergenerational story: It is
known that the whole tragedy begins on Saturday, May 26, 1951, when my father’s father
committed suicide. My father was a son of just over three at the time, who also lost his mother to
trauma at the same time, and was taken into orphanage conditions in the 1950s with his older
brother a couple of years older. We can only try to imagine how traumatic that time was overall for
a boy who went through his first developmental crisis in his life.
If you want information about the conditions of children’s homes or orphanage in Finland decades
ago, you can find a report prepared by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health on the
shortcomings of child welfare substitution and child abuse 1937–1983 (2016) and Timo Harrikari’s
book History of Child Welfare – Dissertation In the orphanage conditions of that time and kind, my
father discovered drugs even before school age.
My father was 23 years old when he began a short and dramatic phase of life with my mother, and
within a year I had already been born into this world and reality. My father beat my mother. As
other children play police and ambulance games on the car, our family lived a different reality in the
sound world of these flashing lights and alarm vehicles. Dad’s impulsive lifestyle with its mild
phenomena was mundane. When my sister was born, I was about 18 months old. The first years of
my life I lived in the midst of chaos: my father used drugs, committed crimes and was violent. The
father was described at that time as a character disorder. When I was less than two years old, my
father killed our family friend, which my mother witnessed with her own eyes, my sister and I did
not see this horror, but it lives in our body, in our minds, its own more or less recognizable life. The
killing took place on the front door of our then home, with our children in another room.
I lost my father to prison and my mother to trauma. Lived in late 1973, and my little sister was
about three months old. There were still no known therapies, but the “blue pills” the mother got into
the worst trouble to somehow get to her feet. My mother’s father retrieved our broken family from
the Helsinki metropolitan area to Savo, where the mother was originally from, and the mother tried
her best go on with life. And life went on.
Within a year or so, the mother found a new man in a newspaper advertisement and moved to the
periphery of Lapland. For my part, this continued traumatic period. My stepfather did not accept me
when my father’s lively, Karelian blood flowed in my veins. I experienced multiple forms of
violence for about eleven years, which ended when my stepfather finally strangled me unconscious.
I found a place in the orphanage myself. The changes brought a sense of externality; I was
exceptional in the eyes and ears of many; well, that’s what I still am. Naturally, in hindsight,
custody was my salvation, but I still felt a sense of alienation, and some teachers at school said I
couldn’t get good numbers for a certificate because I was in foster care at an orphanage.
However, during my time as an orphanage, I was able to live a non-violent and safe everyday life.
My stepfather was convicted of beating me. There was a time when the child protection law had
come into force, prohibiting physical punishment as a means of control, and also criminalizing it. I
admit, the verdict has seemed contradictory to this day: eleven years of multifaceted violence came
with a price tag of FIM 800. I admit, violence was viewed legally as a single case of strangulation.
Today, the district court’s decision must also be judged by the circumstances and attitudes of its
time. In any case, the 11-year history of violence remained unidentified and unrecognized.
Therapy was not yet known in Lapland’s in the periphery in the 80’s, as it is today. In retrospect,
however, the custody was both traumatic and therapeutic. Today, I rate personal custady time as
good overall. The traumatic experience arose from a change that took place suddenly, albeit of one’s
own volition, to another place: new people, places, housing, school, that is, everything went
practically new, with all the senses and a ki
nd of insecurity, strangeness in a foreign environment.
I was in an orphanage until I was an adult. As naive, I imagined that family reunification would be
possible, but I was disappointed. I wasn’t part of a family, and I didn’t have a local area network.
The help system helped me in the budding growth process, but the rest of the family and family
community stayed alive in their own lives. I eventually moved into my own rental apartment, and
supported myself by going to work. Luckily in the accident, at the time, I was allowed to work
without training, no matter how much I was able to and wanted. The work strengthened my sense of
self-worth, I managed. The price of loneliness was high in many ways, for example, I didn’t have
the resources to study.
I was used to violence from birth. I also found it natural that I started dating socially violent men
who also had more or less problems with drugs. I couldn’t question the violence or the use of drugs
because it was commonplace for me. As a child, I experienced a variety of forms of violence on my
father’s side, including sexual violence. It also meant that when I moved into the orphanage, I lived
as an nymph in the early ’80s. I only realized this after therapies and analyzes.
My first boyfriend also got a verdict for my beating, this time the broken bones brought a couple of
thousand marks to my wallet. At the time, I realized in my gut that there was no point in trying to
deal with experiences of violence like me in courtrooms where the perspective is thin, and with
getting help, it ultimately has quite an instrumental value, that is, for me. I thought at the time that
other ways of solving problems should be found. It has remained on this path so far, despite
experiences of violence.
Eventually, it wasn’t until the failure of my second marriage that I began to realize that I was living
in the midst of a variety of violence that had become a part of my natural life. The violence was
revealed by a social worker talking to me when my kids were whored me – it was the famous
iceberg peak in my own life. Isn’t violence normal? I hadn’t even thought about how the children
spoke before, because that’s how the men had talked to their spouses, the sub-style talk was about
everyday life, and the sentences were more filled with swear words, or anything else to come.
Eventually, a whole history of intergenerational violence was revealed beneath the surface. A big
thank you for the understanding that arises goes to both the social services and the therapist with
whom I dealt with my childhood traumas during the first decade of the millennium.
In the side sentence, I mention that the accumulated intergenerational deprivation meant for me,
among other things, living below the poverty line, embracing untreated traumas and distortions into
identity, growing and living in the midst of multiple violence (physical, economic, mental, social,
sexual), police, convictions handed down in the district court, intoxicants, intoxicant psychoses,
with which the doors of the municipal involuntary care opened and closed like in the saloons, and
also the periods of state mental hospitalization.
Break
I started a family like my mother at the age of 22, before therapy, so it happened to me as the
textbooks write: intergenerational traumas passed on to my children. In the 1990s, when I had
children, I learned to read independently. My literacy was non-existent; I didn’t even understand
what I was reading at the sentence level. My understanding of our society or being a mother was
completely lost. This underline my violent and traumatic growth and living conditions. After
learning to read well enough in my own opinion, I started studying side by side with the therapy
process in 2000.
As a mother, it has been painful to realize the transition of a heavy intergenerational legacy to my
offspring, with untreated material of violence and trauma spilling down on them from on the side of
both families. In practice, however, I was nailed to the scapegoat in both sides, so I also had to bear
the transgenerational sins of the father of the children. You can try to imagine that in the process of
seeking help and in the process of dismantling trauma, there have been numerous attempts to
silence me over the past decades, violently.
Many in my own circle have not even imagined being able to ask for help. If someone even
mentioned that they were seeking therapy, then someone close to them has more or less pressured
them to keep quiet. Fear held on. Violence and shame paralyzed! From every direction, there was a
more or less loud voice about how only women, the insane and the sick seek help. I was the only
one who eventually sought help. I started growing in the terrain where I stood on no-man’s-land. I
didn’t belong in the mainstream, but neither did I belong to my own (family community).
My family and family community, that is, my own reality alongside other families and
communities. Within the family and the family community, there was a formality where no help
was sought, even if the head was under the armpit. Neighbors and teachers saw the consequences of
the violence, but things were looked through. Violence within the walls of the home was an internal
matter for families, not a legal issue – again, things should be looked at according to the prevailing
stratum of time, just before the child protection law came into force. Between different worlds and
realities, a kind of transparent film emerges that was hard to break.
This is not just a way of working for those living in the midst of intergenerational violence and
trauma, but also universal. Saska Saarikoski wrote an excellent column about this phenomenon in
Helsingin Sanomat There are no knights of democracy in tribal politics (28.11.2021). Those who
live in different realities can even reinforce the plot and reality of the couplet for fear of being
wrong – the power of ego or defenses should not be underestimated. However, the autopilot can
wake up to a new reality. Anne Anttonen (2019, 97) summarizes this in one sentence, how my life
in this growth process could be described: “In the mind, the old must dare to break down so that the
new can grow in its place”.
As I came out of the ten-year process of basic education and therapy, I began to realize that while I
myself had benefited from them, unfortunately, it had not passed on to the well-being of my
offspring. At the same time, my children had grown up in adolescence at a good pace, and were
looking for drugs for their anxiety, unexplained malaise, and feeling of emptiness. I recognized the
intergenerational legacy: chaos, traumatic living conditions in one’s own children lifestyles and
behaviors (intoxicants, violence, crime, school difficulties, etc.). As a mother, the most painful thing
has been to follow the rapid downward spiral of destruction in my youngest child.
My children were born in the middle of an untreated history of intergenerational violence and
trauma. In their texts, psychodynamic psychotherapists and analysts describe how a child’s open
mind is conducive to receiving unprocessed, unspoken trauma in the depths of the mind to carry.
For those living in a history of intergenerational violence and trauma, it is almost impossible to
understand, from the perspective of the best interests of the child, for example, the first natural
developmental crisis called defiance. In these circumstances, both professionals and parents are
prone to the problem or problems of the child being left helpless: say the child is hypersensitive, or
has a defect, these natural symptoms are now easily diagnosed, which is why is stigmatizing for a
child’s development. Ultimately, the issue is that a child’s ability to regulate emotions requires
adults who are sufficiently balanced to receive and accept emotions and assist the child in this ta
sk.
When this developmental crisis does not go through in a sufficiently positive way, the problems
start to show up in kindergarten, but above all, going to school can bring big challenges. For your
information, large group sizes like ours are a disaster. Those children who have not received a calm
and balanced adult in close living and growing conditions, their ability to tolerate different emotions
is extremely difficult. When my own children came into the first developmental crisis, it opened a
window into my own untreated history of intergenerational violence and trauma, and at that point I
had only a huge negative emotional arena I was faced with without advice and artificial – to face
my own innate, intergenerational horror.
When my youngest child started school, he was bullied at school. At school, the adults were
helpless and my son took power into his own hands, so my 7 years old son was eyeless violent, so
the teacher arbitrarily (hear my message, also illegally) dropped out of school. The head of school
tried to fix the situation, but things had progressed out of the frying pan into the fire, you know how
many times. My son was already starting to have symptoms psychotically. The situation in
psychiatry was poor, so attempts were made to fix the situation through child protection. Which, in
turn, increased the radicalization of the external signs and symptoms of trauma history in my son
from the still unrecognized overgeneration history. Or if it was already identified, we were all adults
(relatives, loved ones, and professionals) as helpless as my son with his own malaise and distress.
My son also had a slogan ingrained as a generational legacy – it is a shame to seek help! I stress that
the aid providers were helpless to help my child and, me and our relatives – we were now also part
of a structural system, and unidentified structural violence.
When my son came of adolescence, the intoxicants were also a momentary way out of his insane
hell. However, with the relief brought by the drugs, the effects were destructive to both, to Jere
himself and others. Jere drifted into the loop from which there was no way out. In his last year of
life, loop led to substance abuse psychoses, which also led him to physical injury.
The distress and anxiety of my adult child worsened and my son was considered difficult to care
for. The treatment of the physical injuries and being inside the walls of the hospital reassured me
and other loveones (Jere survived, he was alive), but my son was not helped by the attitudes of the
nursing staff he felt along his guts. In the end, as a full citizen, Jere was allowed to choose to live on
the sixth floor of an apartment building, although many professionals, not to mention those close to
him, considered the decision absurd.
Jere was suicidal and psychotic, but the psychiatrist didn’t see it the same way. Jere moved into the
apartment, and had time to live in the apartment for nine days until he called the emergency center,
for the first time in his own life, and asked for help. In the meantime, we loved ones lived around
the clock for these nine days, which involved intoxicants, violence, police, government activity,
sleepless nights, but it would take so long to open them that I would not stick to the schedule we
had agreed in advance.
The ambulance staff assessed the situation and stated that the young person wanted treatment
himself, so seeking treatment should be done traditionally: that is, he had to go to the health center
by a non-ambulance, wheelchair was considered a problem. Invatax was ordered, but it never
arrived either. I was left helpless as a follower with my own difficult feelings that I didn’t even
understand at the time, I was in shock. Jere became isolated. We made a statement of concern to
which social work responded quickly, but still too late. Jere committed suicide two days later,
jumping down from the sixth floor.
Break
The rituals on earth — organizing a ceremony of blessing and remembrance — kept me physically
alive, even though I was like a walking body. I returned to work six weeks after the my son’s death.
It felt heavy but necessary. Life goes on. And as I write this, Jere lives in me.
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Socially, in the last few years we have read about the gruesome violent deaths in Finland, such as
the case of Vilja Eerika and Koskela, through the news. For families with over-generationally
accumulated deprivation, events are unnecessarily mundane. Right now, the gaze is on these
children and young people, for a reason. Socially always topical issue.
Through my own life experience, I can draw and pass on information about the reality that is passed
on to the webs of most readers and / or viewers through news or movies or literature. I can also
argue that almost all, if not all, tragedies like this are intergenerational, and there are no simple and
quick tools to undo them. I know that medicines are too easily sought after as if they were some
magic pills.
Nor can I be at this point without emphasizing how family situations should be addressed in a
timely, early, preventive and / or preventative manner. Prevention is a difficult matter; in our
society, political decision-making does not value prevention or invest resources in it. Prevention
cannot be numbered or converted into euros. In human life, those living in overgeneration
deprivation even pay for it with human lives.
My story is intergenerational in many ways, including the fact that we grew up in a third generation
orphanage. We, who are growing up in the midst of intergenerational deprivation, are trying to
pursue, in an ambitious way, even at the expense of our own well-being, the average conditions of
the causal curve. We are valuable, we equally want to be seen and heard, above all accepted. We
want to participate! Despite desire, we don’t all have the courage or resources to participate.
How to fight for a more efficient common service system? In it we have a common tab to plow. I
assume, ladies and gentlemen, that we can agree that traumatic experiences affect us in many ways
and on many levels. The entire intergenerational history of which I am a part and the symptoms and
problem-solving have largely been placed on the shoulders of child protection. In an individualcentered ethos, both successes and failures are piled on the shoulders of the individual. In recent
times, we have also organized and retained responsibility for the individual social worker
responsible for the child through legislation.
According to the lack of understanding that has favored me in these years of growth, the political
state of mind since the recession of the 1990s has been that working with a person, be it psychiatry
or otherwise, is a job from which marks and euros have always been cut. Interest rates have come to
interest with the new financial crises. It is also claimed that Finland may be more prosperous
financially than ever before, but somewhere today’s euros seem to be flowing. The wheel of
political decision-making is spinning slowly, and that is not a new thing for any of us either.
So we don’t have to come up with a new bike when it already exists. As Greta Thunberg pointed
out in her speeches, the problems associated with the climate crisis have been known for decades,
but there is no political will to change. We also know that the problems with the well-being of
children and their families have not disappeared, and I would venture to say that the Covid-19
epidemic has not alleviated the situation, at least not. In practice, there have also been gaps and
problems in the social and health care system for decades, and there are equally no known ways to
solve them, but there is a lack of will to implement them.
Today, for example, systemic thinking prevails. As the philosopher Esa Saarinen points out, “lite
bättre” must be done. Multidisciplinary and
multidisciplinary co-operation means encouraging
action in accordance with the law – the law is on the human side and the responsibility for
complying with and enforcing the law lies with the authorities – and the will and courage to do a
little more. Of these, YouTube is full of TED talk.
Finland reaps a reputation in the world for healthcare. In terms of my own offspring, I have
apparently proved this twice in Tyks’ intensive care unit – treating the physical traumas caused by
substance abuse psychosis in Finland is something incredible, and ethical competence is also
palpable. In our experience, when we move on to treating psychological trauma, the situation
changes completely.
Break
And further, the solutions are also a genuine opportunity for inclusion for the client, the patient, the
citizen, and the ability to involve us in decision-making – not just that inclusion is a word on paper.
Hopefully, these words will encourage the authorities and social and health professionals, as well as
politicians with power, to act.
And I cannot continue to emphasize the importance of prevention, early support and assistance. A
symptom of a child, adolescent, or anyone is a healthy signal of dysfunctional living conditions.
The family and other local area network are the living conditions of the child and the young person.
Intergenerational violence and trauma live in families, communities, and structures, and their
identification is extremely important. Violence and trauma produce shame and isolate it, so outside
visionaries and lyricists are needed.
Break
Until my son died, my life was largely driven by fear. It was consuming to sit in the health center
emergency room repeatedly because of the psychoticism of an adult child. Everyday life was not
conveyed to the expert’s own consciousness and reality through the vibrating and retinal membranes
of the doctor assessing the health center. We lived in a different reality. A psychotic patient may be
well composed for a while. The voice of the parents was not worth anything in this wrestling of
Jacob, more of a distraction.
Break
As I got my youngest son moving to the afterlife, I let go of my child with love. This was also part
of the concrete identification of intergenerational ceodependence. I was certainly largely
blindfolded as I grew up imagining what love is. It wasn’t until my son died that I guess I could get
more out of love.
After my son´s death, some doctors were on my toes with me. There was a feeling that they were
afraid that I was an angry and bitter mother, which is a threat to them. Ladies and gentlemen, if I
were bitter, first of all I would not be here to give you this speech. On the other hand, with
therapeutic work, anger has become a resource – it is a driving force. It has allowed me to soothe
my guts on the couches of therapists and analysts, learn to read and write, go through various
trainings.
I am also asked how to get over the violent death of an adult child. The answer is short and concise:
I can’t get over my son’s death and I can’t get around! I just have to live with that fact for the rest of
my life. With therapy, I have somehow been able to work and structure traumatic experiences and
locate them into a lived life history.
Because of the traumatic experiences of childhood, I fell into depression and panic disorder in real
life. If I lived in today’s childhood and adolescence, I would probably have a slew of other
diagnoses that have become a kind of fashion phenomenon: ADHD, READING DISORDER, and
an unstable personality that would be treated with different medications, among others. With
therapy, I got rid of depression and panic disorder. So far, I have been without psychiatric
medications, SSRI´s and sedatives, since the beginning of 2007. Did you know that you can recover
from panic disorder, learn to read and write in adulthood and the like? Did you know that trauma
can occur without medication, and that is also desirable. This is how my psychiatrist and trauma
therapist worked alongside me in the death of my son. Using medication would probably have
prolonged the treatment of traumatic experiences. I don’t mean to be anti-drug, I really am, but
unnecessarily sensitive to them today I think are prescribed. Even suffering has to do.
Break
My life is built on this point in chaotic conditions, as a child, a young person, an adult, a parent. The
emergency center of the health center is a stage where hearing the voice of a parent, a close, relative
is random. The service system is a structural institution with a fairly thin contact with people’s
actual daily lives, especially in intergenerational conditions that are not transmitted to the doctor’s
office. The concern and distress of a parent, loved one, relative can be interpreted as strange or
distracting. The patient may be rational and logical in the institutional setting, while relatives may
appear hysterical. Everyday reality is often left outside the institutions. In my experience, it would
be strange, to say the least, if the behavior of a loved one did not seem irrational in the doctor’s
office, if until then the loved ones even got there. Anxiety and distress are conveyed out of our
parents, loved ones, relatives, which is part of another everyday reality. Living in the middle of a
generational hell is survival.
(Break)
On the other hand, political decision-making invests in expensive special services for child
protection, most often organized by the private sector: private entrepreneurs pull big money into
wallets, and in some places the conditions for the growth of children in care are poor. We know,
therefore, who benefits materially and intangible, but often they are not children, young people, or
their families.
Ladies and gentlemen, there is a citizen brought up and educated by society. As you can see, I can
draw a picture of my past experiences for you in one way, if not another. As I grew up as a member
of society, I tried to strive in an ambitious way, even at the expense of my own well-being, for the
average conditions of the causal curve. For one reason or another, many of us have not received or
could not even imagine starting an intensive therapy relationship: it requires resources such as
money and mental tools to face our own intergenerational legacy – how broken people are born who
try their best but inadvertently continue to inherit. It is difficult to face one’s own shortcomings,
weaknesses, shortcomings.
Authorities and professionals repeatedly hear from families like us that EVERYTHING is fine,
even if all of life is really the same hell, and that too is human because there is often no trust and no
sense of security in the service system, or at all. We learn to survive alone – that is also the ethos of
our society. Weakness is shame, intergenerational tragedy is shame.
In families like ours, where we suffer from accumulated deprivation, situations are often difficult
and multifaceted. Facing these things requires compassion and love, as well as multidisciplinary
resources. Indeed, helpless professionals work with helpless families, as I pointed out at the
beginning. It is as if professional pride goes with that incompetence or helplessness. In my opinion,
a true professional is able to take off his or her professional protective mask and admit the pain
points that come to life.
Break
We have ways to help families like us. Among other things, the world praises the dialogical
networking model, which is also referred to as the Keroputa model, in which the patient / client also
has his or her existing local network, without forgetting that not everyone has a local network. I
often wonder why this is used so little in Finland. The symptom of a child, or anyone, is a healthy
sign of dysfunctional living conditions. The local area and especially the family is the living
conditions of t
he patient or client. Those families with unidentified, accumulated intergenerational
disadvantage are not yet known where to peek. It needs outsiders and lyricists. The ability to care
for the weaker.
I assume, ladies and gentlemen, that we can agree that traumatic experiences affect us. The
psychological problems of intergenerational history have been largely addressed in child protection.
In these chaotic conditions, however, every custody is a new nailed board to the coffin cover, it
traumatizes. Our system is also traumatized. Attitudinal change needed: Difficult situations for
families can be addressed through and through early and timely and preventive interventions.
Above all, our experience partners, who have experience expertise, should be allowed to participate
in the service system development process. Many things are out of reach of bureaucracy and
structural problems and causes. Some things have already been recorded in government programs, it
is time to turn the recorded words into deeds. Implementation and implementation is also a human
rights issue. I have often described the process of building the Church of Isaac. With this speech, I
have once again put one brick in place. The work continues, together. Indeed, we need to talk about
what we are keeping quiet about. It’s a matter of life